British trench near the Albert–Bapaume road at Ovillers-la-Boisselle, July 1916 during the Battle of the Somme.

Abstract: The Torah requires all Israelite soldiers to carry a shovel with them for covering their feces, outside the war camp, because God is in the camp. The Torah never declares human waste to be impure, yet this is how the law is interpreted by the Qumranites and Karaites. Rabbinic interpretation picks up on the idea of covering waste before God and extends the law to prayer and Torah study. In medieval Jewish interpretation, the law is interpreted homiletically, as a goad towards maintaining human decency at all times, even during war.

Introduction

Two curious laws in Parashat Ki Teitzei, in Deuteronomy 23:11-15, relate to battlefield conduct. Both come under the heading,

23:11 If anyone among you has been rendered unclean by a nocturnal emission, he must leave the camp, and he must not reenter the camp. 23:12 Toward evening he shall bathe in water, and at sundown he may reenter the camp.

The second law commands that the latrine be outside the camp and all feces covered:

23:13 There shall be an area for you outside the camp, where you may relieve yourself. 23:14 With your gear you shall have a spike,[2] and when you have squatted you shall dig a hole with it and cover up your excrement. 23:15 Since Yhwh your God moves about in your camp to protect you and to deliver your enemies to you, let your camp be holy; let Him not find anything unseemly (ערות דבר) among you and turn away from you.

The Discordant Juxtaposition of the LawsThe two laws are oddly juxtaposed. The first addresses what looks like a straightforward matter of ritual impurity, comparable to Leviticus 15:16, “When a man has an emission of semen, he shall bathe his whole body in water and remain unclean until evening.”[3] Even though that law is found in the Priestly material, it likely reflects broader ancient Israelite norms.[4]

The second seems to address the more amorphous concept of excrement being disgusting. Since God, in the Bible’s conception, appears in Israelite war camps to save them from their enemies, Deuteronomy warns the people not to leave their feces exposed and risk offending God and causing God to leave the camp, thereby endangering the soldiers’ lives.[5]

War Stinks

Army Camps and ExcrementWe will take up the second law in this essay. By chance, I began to draft this commentary on August 4, the date of Great Britain’s declaration of war against Germany in 1914. The World War I centennial in 2014 garnered considerable media attention, but one prominent aspect of the so-called Great War cannot be captured in words, and that is the unbearable squalor at the front—the reek of unwashed bodies, rotting corpses, and human waste.

Protracted trench warfare made it impossible to maintain civilized standards of sanitation and hygiene. The typical toilet was a trench latrine dug out at the rear of the line. Using the latrine was not only disgusting but also perilous, leaving the user dangerously exposed to enemy fire, so buckets and biscuit tins often were employed instead, to be emptied by soldiers unfortunate enough to be assigned to sanitary duty. An American physician’s memoir[6] reports an encounter with one of those soldiers, whose informally bestowed title is unprintable:

[Colonel] Burroughes was pointing to the man carrying the bucket of [human waste]. Passersby were giving him a wide berth, as wide as you can give in a trench. “What do they do, exactly, Col. Burroughes?” The answer seemed pretty obvious, but I didn’t want to look uninterested. “Keep the trench clean. Clean as they can, anyway. Men can’t just be crapping anywhere. They use a bucket in this dugout here,” he pointed to the smelliest dugout on earth, above it was a sign, “Rose Hips and Jasmine Lane.”… “The [waste] wallahs—we have two per battalion—carry it away and dump it.” Looking around the crowded, narrow trench, I couldn’t imagine where, exactly, “away” was.

This responsibility of those beleaguered “wallahs”—to retain a modicum of decency in atrocious conditions—corresponds to the concern addressed in Deuteronomy 23:13-14.

Major General Friedrich Wilhelm Augustus, Baron von Steuben

The problem of sanitation during wartime is hardly unique to World War I. Friedrich von Steuben famously solved the latrine problem for George Washington during the Revolutionary War.

Before von Steuben’s arrival, colonial American soldiers were notorious for their slovenly camp conditions. Von Steuben insisted on reorganization to establish basic hygiene. He demanded that kitchens and latrines be put on opposite sides of the camp, with latrines facing a downhill slope. (Just having latrines was novelty to the Continental troops who were accustomed to living among their own filth.)[7]

As recently as Israel’s Six Day War, it was difficult to retain a modicum of hygiene. Yoel bin Nun, for example, describes his June 1967 camp thus:

There were no outhouses: white tape marked areas where soldiers relieved themselves. The orchards filled with clouds of gnats so bold that the men had to cover their mouths when the yawned.[8]

Like the “[waste] wallah”, the “white tape marked area” represented an attempt to accomplish what Deut. 23:14-15 commanded, to keep the camp “holy” and have nothing “unseemly” within it.

Sanitation in the Ancient World

The everyday sanitary practices of most people in the ancient world (of many in the modern world,[9] regrettably) were not much better than those in more modern military trenches.

Biblical PeriodOded Borowski notes that “few sanitary facilities from the Iron Age in Palestine have been discovered in archeological excavations.”[10] In a classic study of hygiene in ancient Israel, Edward Neufeld dryly observes, “The general conditions were not conducive to personal, home, or public hygiene.”[11]

Roman/Rabbinic PeriodThe situation was not much better in Roman-period Palestine. As Jodi Magness remarks about Rome and its colonies, people without access to toilet facilities “relieved themselves anywhere they could, including in streets and alleys, staircases of dwellings, bath houses and other public buildings, and tombs.”[12]

Excrement and Impurity in Qumran Literature

The bodily functions of waste elimination, unlike the seminal emissions discussed in Deuteronomy 23:11-12, normally do not induce impurity, and the Bible never describes excrement to be a substance that imparts impurity. The visibility of excrement, nevertheless, is “unseemly” and undermines the “holiness” of the camp.

The Qumran sectarians, on the basis of their own biblical interpretation, believed that excrement was impure,[13] so they adopted stringent requirements for its disposal. The rules for the apocalyptic battle they anticipated in the “War Scroll” include a paraphrase and adaptation of Deuteronomy 23:11-15:

Any man who is not ritually clean in respect to his genitals on the day of battle shall not go down with them, for holy angels are present with their army. There shall be a space between all their camps and the latrine of about two thousand cubits [about .9 km], and no shameful nakedness[14] shall be seen in the environs of all their camps.[15]

Rabbinic Regulations – Excrement not Impure

In contrast to the sectarians, the rabbinic tradition does not subsume the removal of human waste from the camp under the laws of purity, since rabbinic literature does not deem excrement to be a substance that imparts impurity.[16]

Excrement as a Barrier to PrayerInstead of using purity laws to explain Deut 23:13-15, the rabbis extended the concept of avoiding excrement in God’s presence to the laws of prayer and Torah study, during which the supplicant is, ostensibly, before God. According to Tosefta Berakhot 2:17 (Lieberman ed.), for example,

One should not enter alleyways that are soiled [with human waste] and recite the Shema‘; one who walked into [the alleyway] while already reciting should stop until after exiting the area entirely.[17]

Tying this rabbinic halakha to the biblical verse, R. Levi ben Gershom (Deut. ad loc.) comments that excrement must be buried for both quotidian and religious reasons:

So they will not smell the stench in the holy camp and for the glory of God; from this we learn that it is unfitting to pray or to utter holy words in a place where there is excrement unless it has been covered.

Similarly, Ramban comments that the reason for covering excrement is because it ruins the prayer experience:[18]

The reason for covering excrement is not because excrement is like impurity and makes its surroundings impure…rather, it is forbidden to see it at the time of prayer, when the heart cleaves to the Glorious Name, because disgusting things give rise to revulsion in the soul and disrupt the concentration of the pure heart.

Ramban’s formulation here makes the rule even more abstract. No longer is he worried about God’s presence per se, but rather about what this revolting substance will do to the person’s prayer when he or she prays to God.

Two Conceptions of Purity in the Bible

While the Qumran and Karaite sectarians assimilate the regulations in Deuteronomy to the legislation in Leviticus, the rabbinic interpreters seem at least tacitly aware of the ideological divide between the two in the biblical material—even in the case of superficially similar laws.

In his brilliant essay, “Purity and Impurity in the Deuteronomic Conception of Holiness,” the late Israeli Bible scholar Moshe Weinfeld demonstrated that while the priestly notion of purity and impurity is essentially cultic, and of “a markedly ritual character,” Deuteronomy conceives of impurity in a more quotidian sense, as “a repugnant and odious condition which a holy and noble people ought to avoid.”[19] This conceptual difference is manifest irrespective of the relative dating of the Leviticus and Deuteronomy texts, which remains a matter of debate.

Deuteronomy’s Worldview: Not Purity but DecencyThe sanitary practice in Deuteronomy 23:13-15 is mandated not because it is required for the sake of ritual purity, but because “disgusting things” have no place in any human endeavor—especially during wartime since God will be present in the camp.

With neither Temple nor priests to provide the means of ritual purification, a notion of “cleanliness” in word and action effectively supersedes the particular demands of cultic purity. Decency becomes the norm.

Rabbinic commentators interpreted the law as an expansive ethical obligation to maintain “cleanliness” in the presence of God at all times, even in the trenches (so to speak). This rabbinic reinterpretation extends the law’s import beyond the specific biblical concern with God’s presence in the military camp. Decency in hygiene is required all the time, certainly during times of prayer and study, and even in wartime. Decency entails distancing from everything filthy, from the literal foulness of human waste to the figurative stench of repulsive human behavior, possibly including the act of war itself. To conclude with Ramban,

Even the most upright person by nature will don cruelty and wrath (cf. Proverbs 27:4) when going out to war against an enemy. That is why Scripture warns, “Be on your guard against anything untoward.”

In this reading, the Torah teaches that even the basest details of our lives can impinge on our pursuit of morality and our relationship with God.

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Professor Alan Cooper is the Elaine Ravich Professor of Jewish Studies and provost of The Jewish Theological Seminary. He joined the faculty in 1997 as professor of Bible, and has served as provost since 2007. In 1998, he was appointed professor of Bible at the Union Theological Seminary, a nondenominational Christian seminary, becoming the first person to hold professorships at both JTS and Union. He previously was a professor of Bible at Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion, where for six years he was director of its School of Graduate Studies. Dr. Cooper earned a bachelor’s degree in Religion at Columbia University. He went on to do his graduate work at Yale University, earning a master of philosophy degree and doctorate in Religious Studies. His recent publications include “Some Aspects of Traditional Jewish Psalms Interpretation,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Psalms, ed. William P. Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), pp. 253-268; and “Introduction to the Book of Leviticus,” to appear (In German) in Die Tora in der Übersetzung Ludwig Philippsons (new revised edition; Freiburg: Herder, [in press]).

[4] See, similarly, that way that the laws concerning the niddah (menstruous woman) are only found in P legislation, but are reflected, e.g., in 2 Sam 11:4..

[5] Avoiding the anthropomorphism inherent in the biblical material, Rashbam and Joseph Bekhor Shor explain that the purity of the camp had to be protected because the Divine Presence, manifest in the ark and the sacred vessels, accompanied the troops into battle. Both commentators adduce Numbers 31:6 in support.

[8] Taken from, Yossi Halevi Klein, Like Dreamers: The Story of the Israeli Paratroopers Who Reunited Jerusalem and Divided a Nation (Harper Collins, 2014), 54.

[9] The United Nations estimates that there are 2.5 billion people who lack adequate sanitary facilities and a little over 1 billion who practice open defecation. See, for example, thisNew York Times articleabout malnutrition caused by poor sanitation in India.

[13] So also the Karaites, as my brother-in-law Prof. Daniel Frank kindly informs me, placing this among the many shared features of Qumranian and Karaite law that differ from rabbinic halakhah.

[14] Hebrew ‘ervat davar ra‘, conflating the terms used in Deuteronomy 23:15 and 23:10 respectively, and interpreting ‘ervah as “nakedness” rather than “unseemliness” (JPS).

[15] ‎1Q‎33 (1QMilhamah)‎ ‎VII‎:‎5-‎7; see further the sanitary facilities of the New Jerusalem, at a considerable remove from the city, envisioned in the “Temple Scroll,” 11Q‎19 (11QTemple-a)‎ ‎XLVI‎:‎13-‎16.

[16] See M Makhshirin 6:7; BT Yoma 30a; JT Pesahim 7:12 (35b).

[17] See also BT Berakhot 22b and 25a; Ramban on Deuteronomy 23:10ff.

[18] See also Sifrei Deuteronomy 254, which Ramban quotes in support of his interpretation.

[19] See Weinfeld’s Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomic School (Oxford: Oxford U, 1972), pp. 225-232 (quotations on 225-226); more recently, Udo Rüderswörden, “Purity Conceptions in Deuteronomy,” in Christian Frevel and Christophe Nihan (eds.), Purity and the Forming of Religious Tradition in the Ancient Mediterranean World and Ancient Judaism (Dynamics in the History of Religion 3; Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 413-428.

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